How Many Pages Should Your Website Have?

How Many Pages Should Your Website Have? And Why Or How Does It Affect My SEO?

One question frequently asked by our clients is, “How many pages should my website have?” While providing a definitive answer is challenging, we offer some valuable advice to small business owners and nonprofits when it comes to determining the appropriate amount of content for their websites.

Understanding Your Two Audiences

Before delving into the specifics, it’s crucial to recognize that your website caters to two distinct audiences:

Human Visitors aka Real Life People: These include potential customers, clients, and other individuals interested in your offerings. Think of people who are actually searching for your products or services.
Browsers & Search Engines: Notably, popular search engines like Google and Yahoo, play a vital role in driving online traffic. There are also crawlers, indexing sites, and many more that we keep in mind when building your website so that the NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) gets integrated where it needs to whenever possible.

Both these audiences hold significance, and striking a balance is key. While human visitors take precedence, search engines should not be overlooked. Let’s explore the needs of each audience and create a sample site map highlighting the pages you may consider including on your website.

Appealing to Human Visitors with Simplicity

To engage human visitors effectively, simplicity is key. A clutter-free, user-friendly website is essential. In this context, less can often be more. It’s important to convey your message concisely, presenting information through easily readable lists, headlines, and brief paragraphs.

Here are some sample pages we typically recommend for human visitors:

Home
About Us
Services (or Products, depending on your business)
Events
Photo Gallery
Get Involved (primarily for nonprofits, featuring options such as Donate and Volunteer)
Testimonials
Our History (in some cases, the About Us page may serve as an Our History page, while other scenarios may require both)
Contact Us

How many pages should my website have? Sample site map

This list is not exhaustive, as additional pages may be necessary depending on the organization and its offerings. Nonetheless, these are common pages that provide a solid foundation.

However, it’s crucial to note that this list is ideally smaller than what you should actually include on your website. This brings us to the following consideration: search engines.

Satisfying Search Engines with Sufficient Content

If you aspire to achieve favorable rankings on search engines such as Google, you must provide them with ample content. Merely having 5 or 6 pages is often insufficient to capture Google’s attention, and a mere paragraph or two per page falls well short of the mark.

In addition to the core pages targeting human users mentioned earlier, we recommend incorporating the following pages to appeal to search engines:

Sub-categories under the Services page: Instead of a generic Home Remodeling page, consider creating dedicated pages for Kitchen Remodeling, Bathroom Remodeling, Sunrooms, etc.
Why Choose Us?
Who We Serve
Articles/Blog

Sample site map with search engine pages

The Articles/Blog section holds significant value. We delve into its importance in our article titled “The Importance of Article Writing.” In essence, consistently adding high-quality content to your website is crucial to garnering attention from search engines. A blog or article section serves as an effective and straightforward means to accomplish this goal.

While these pages are primarily intended for search engines, it’s acceptable if human visitors also find them informative and engaging. The main objective, however, is to optimize these pages with relevant keywords.

Organizing Your Pages

With an extensive list of pages, it’s essential to organize them effectively for your human visitors. Implementing a hover menu proves intuitive, assisting visitors in locating their desired information easily. You’ve likely encountered hover menus while browsing the internet. They typically display a dropdown list when the user hovers their mouse over a specific category, thus maintaining a clean and uncluttered appearance for larger websites.

Sample Site Map

After considering the needs of both humans and search engines, the sample site map above balances a simple menu for people with enough depth for search engines.